Department of Natural Product Biosynthesis, Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, Jena 07745, Germany.
Center for Applied Genetic Technologies, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia 30602, United States.
J Am Chem Soc. 2024 Aug 28;146(34):23891-23900. doi: 10.1021/jacs.4c06336. Epub 2024 Aug 14.
Plants produce an extraordinary array of natural products (specialized metabolites). Notably, these structurally complex molecules are not evenly distributed throughout plant tissues but are instead synthesized and stored in specific cell types. Elucidating both the biosynthesis and function of natural products would be greatly facilitated by tracking the location of these metabolites at the cell-level resolution. However, detection, identification, and quantification of metabolites in single cells, particularly from plants, have remained challenging. Here, we show that we can definitively identify and quantify the concentrations of 16 molecules from four classes of natural products in individual cells of leaf, root, and petal of the medicinal plant using a plate-based single-cell mass spectrometry method. We show that identical natural products show substantially different patterns of cell-type localization in different tissues. Moreover, we show that natural products are often found in a wide range of concentrations across a population of cells, with some natural products at concentrations of over 100 mM per cell. This single-cell mass spectrometry method provides a highly resolved picture of plant natural product biosynthesis partitioning at a cell-specific resolution.
植物产生了种类繁多的天然产物（特化代谢物）。值得注意的是，这些结构复杂的分子在植物组织中并不是均匀分布的，而是在特定的细胞类型中合成和储存。如果能够在细胞水平上追踪这些代谢物的位置，那么阐明天然产物的生物合成和功能将大为便利。然而，对单个细胞中代谢物的检测、鉴定和定量，特别是来自植物的代谢物的检测、鉴定和定量，仍然具有挑战性。在这里，我们展示了一种基于平板的单细胞质谱方法，该方法可以明确地鉴定和定量来自药用植物叶片、根和花瓣中四类天然产物的 16 种分子的浓度。我们发现，相同的天然产物在不同组织中的细胞类型定位上存在显著差异。此外，我们发现天然产物在细胞群体中的浓度范围很广，有些天然产物的浓度超过每个细胞 100mM。这种单细胞质谱方法提供了一个在细胞特异性分辨率下对植物天然产物生物合成分配的高分辨率图像。
